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A whole year

Tomorrow we're having Maggie's first birthday party! A week and half late, but she won't know. Unless this blog still exists ten years later and she comes back and reads this. Anyway, we did celebrate on her actual birthday and had presents and cake and stuff. Well, at least we tried to give her several presents but the first one she opened was Legos and then she got so absorbed in making lots of noise with them that she didn't want to open anything else. Also, I took the day off work on her birthday and spent the day with her, which was sooooo nice. We went for a walk to the park, then had lunch, then went to the toy store, then another nap, then played at home :)

Climbing up the slide

Mini pineapple upside down cake!

A big bag of presents!

So I went and got her Halloween costume last weekend - no fairies and princesses for her! At least until she grows up and insists on it herself. But I got her this awesome dragon costume with cool shiny wings and a spiky tail. Hehe. Sydney thinks people will tell me what a cute little boy I have, and she's probably right, but oh well.

Then again, I'm not even sure if she's going to be able to walk by Halloween to do some trick-or-treating. These days she cruises a lot, and she can stand up by herself for a few seconds at a time, but no walking on her own just yet. But really, she gets into enough trouble as it is with just the crawling. I literally just turn my head and she's somewhere else entirely from when I last looked, usually about to get to some dangerous item, such as bottles of cleaning supplies I've left on the floor. She's also unplugged the vacuum twice now while I was in the middle of using it. Grrr.

Anyway, will report back tomorrow after the birthday party. It will be at the park and we will have bbq and cake.

A forgotten post

that I never finished. It looks like I wrote "it's been a while" and then forgot about this blog for another month (it's now Sept. 30)

Well, it's been a while but Marlon is finally home and so we have gone back to being a dual-parent household, thank goodness. We considered having me go over there for part of the trip but I didn't want to be away from Maggie. And part of it is definitely not family vacation material, since he went to go stay at a small remote village for a week where apparently all the buildings are decrepit and the water and electricity are constantly being shut off. In fact I think I probably would have run away screaming in less than a day.

Anyway, Sydney started 3rd grade last week at her new school. She was super excited to get a locker, and to also carry around real school supplies such as a binder, folders, notebooks, etc rather than just the one folder that contained all her necessities for 2nd grade. She has this enormous binder with a zipper and a shoulder strap that you can literally your lunch bag in. I thought it was overkill (after all, thinking of the adult equivalent here, don't you want the smallest lightest laptop/tablet possible?) and the zipper was poorly constructed and really a pain to open and close but I couldn't kill her excitement.

Maggie is now getting into even more things, opening and closing cabinets, shutting the door to her room, pulling lots of tissues from the tissue box. She doesn't walk yet (just cruises) but her crawling is pretty fast these days. It seems to be the fastest when she sees me pull out a bag of Cheerios. She no longer eats everything I give her and has started spitting things out a lot. In fact, she even feeds herself food and then spits it out (for fun? because she can't remember if it is something she likes or not?).

need to take a deep breath

I am doing too much driving around in a) traffic and b) car with no AC lately. Michele is on vacation so the kids are in a backup daycare which is located in a place that is technically in between home and work, but a few miles of traffic-clogged streets from the freeway. The kind where there are many traffic lights that all seem to turn red when you get to them and then stay red for a very long time while you are all getting sweaty because the car has no AC. (I've been driving Marlon's car because it's in the back of our tandem driveway when I leave and I am too lazy to park it somewhere else then take my own car).

To top it all off, this morning after spending 30 min to get to the daycare I parked and then realized I had forgotten Maggie's stuff. So I drive home to get it then drive back to the daycare where I realize that her bottles had both leaked and spilled milk all over everything else in the bag. Luckily there was still enough food for her to eat though. I ended up arriving at work around 2 hours after I left the house. After I got there I must have looked very frazzled because several people looked at me oddly and then my manager asked me if I was okay. Actually first she asked me if I was getting sick (ok...this might have been because I was just picking at a zit located right my nose so it was kind of red there). Then when I asked her if I looked strange she told me that maybe I need to fix my hair (!) Hahaha. I don't always brush my hair but it must have looked even worse than usual.

Anyway, we had Indian the other night for a change (we have Chinese food about 75% of the time when we go out, usually at the same restaurant). Maggie was a happy baby and consumed a small bowl of her lentils and rice along with 1.5 peaches (her favorite food of the moment, along with plums).

Mags and Daddy!

now where did this come from

Maggie has started making this face all the time. I am not sure where she learned it but Marlon says it's something that I do.

Ignore the food on her tongue (it's tofu)

Also I just got her bows to put on her head because her hair is just not growing fast enough and so she still looks like a boy. Actually even with the bow she just looks like a boy with a bow. Sigh.

pity party

When I'm just going about my life I always think of things I want to write on here. But when I'm actually sitting here on the computer I can't remember any of them. So I will just ramble. I'm tired because last night was one of those nights where Maggie woke up at 3am and started crying. She does that sometimes and I still haven't figured out why. I had this theory it was caffeine getting in the milk from all the Diet Cokes I drink, but I didn't actually have any yesterday...so I don't know. To make matter worse I couldn't go back to sleep last afterwards and was awake until almost the morning. Doesn't help that it was a busy day at work today, too.

So after I get home tonight I was trying to make a soup for dinner. We had fish sticks the last 2 days so I wanted to cook something real today. So then I was had to figure out how to simultaneously cook dinner, feed Maggie, and give her a bath. About 5 minutes after she finished her bath she needed a diaper change again, so I put the changing pad on the floor and started to change her. But she really, really wanted to roll over and crawl off the changing pad, so I'm struggling with keeping her on there as she starts crying and yelling. She gets louder and louder while I'm trying to wipe all the poop off her butt so she doesn't get it all over the place every she manages to escape a little bit, and then the stupid timer in the kitchen decides to go off at the same time. Aaagggh. By the time I was done with the diaper change Maggie was completely pissed off and screaming. Then I go into the kitchen and turn off the timer and put Maggie down and check the chicken I was baking (to put in the soup) and then the chicken juices start spilling all over the place because there was a hole in the foil as Maggie starts crying AGAIN even louder from being put down. Aaaaaagh!

Anyway so now Maggie's in bed and so I'm here having wine and cheese. Ha.

we love kale

Pasta salad with tuscan kale, chicken, grape tomatoes, olives, and parmesan.